By their presence they bring blessings to those who are fond of them. Pixies are said to reward consideration and punish neglect on the part of larger humans, for which Keightley gives examples. Some consider this a cross-over from fairy mythology, and believe it may not have originally been attached to pixies in 1850, Thomas Keightley observed that much of Devon pixie mythology may have originated from fairy myth. Some pixies are said to steal children or to lead travellers astray. In 1890, William Crossing noted a pixie's preference for bits of finery: "Indeed, a sort of weakness for finery exists among them, and a piece of ribbon appears to be. They are often described as ill-clothed or naked. Specific details of the folklore often vary by location, though broad details are held in common. Books devoted to the homely beliefs of the peasantry are filled with incidents of pixie manifestations, and often locales are named for the pixies associated with them. tales about them, I believe them to have been an earlier race." Localised traditions īefore the mid-19th century, pixies and fairies were taken seriously in much of Southern England. One British scholar stated his belief that "Pixies were evidently a smaller race, and, from the greater obscurity of the . Some 19th-century researchers made more general claims about pixie origins, or have connected them with the Puck (Cornish Bucca), a mythological creature sometimes described as a fairy the name Puck is also of uncertain origin Old English Puca, Irish Púca, Welsh Pwca. This suggestion is still met in contemporary writing, but there is no proven connection and the etymology is doubtful. īy 1869 some were suggesting that the name pixie was a racial remnant of Pictic tribes who used to paint and tattoo their skin blue, as with the Irish fairy tradition of the "Pecht". Similarities have also been noted between Germanic and Anglo-Saxon elves, but despite such analogues until the advent of modern literary fiction pixie mythology was localised exclusively to Southern and South Western England. Similar beings exist in Irish ( Aos Sí), Manx ( Mooinjer veggey) Welsh Tylwyth Teg ('Fair Family'), and Breton ( korrigan) folklore, although their common names are unrelated, and even within areas of language survival there is a very high degree of local variation of names. In Cornwall the term Pobel Vean ('Little People') is often used to refer to them collectively. In older Westcountry dialect modern Received Pronunciation letter pairs are sometimes transposed from the older Saxon spelling ( waps for wasp, aks for ask and so on) resulting in piskies in place of modern piksies (pixies) as still commonly found in Devon and Cornwall to modern times. Others have theorised it may be Celtic in origin, though no clear ancestor of the word is known. Some have speculated that it is connected to the Swedish dialectal pyske meaning 'small fairy'. The origin of the word pixie is uncertain. Though in the modern era they are often depicted with pointed ears, a green outfit and a peaked hat, traditionally they are described as round eared, and sometimes as wearing dirty ragged bundles of rags which they happily discard for gifts of new clothes. In traditional regional lore, pixies are generally mischievous, short of stature and childlike they are fond of dancing and gather outdoors in huge numbers to dance, or sometimes wrestle, through the night. Īkin to Anglo-Saxon elves and the Irish and Scottish Aos Sí (also spelt Aos Sidhe), pixies are believed to inhabit ancient underground ancestor sites such as stone circles, barrows, dolmens, ringforts or menhirs. Pixies are considered to be particularly concentrated in the high moorland areas around Devon and Cornwall, and in the New Forest area of Dorset and Hampshire. A pixie (also pisky, pixy, pixi, pizkie, and piskie in Cornwall and Devon, and pigsie or puggsy in the New Forest) is a mythical creature of British folklore.
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